Behind
The winter sky
Gathers a pastel fire,
Like an opal eye
That winks at warmer weather.

We are all born
with a song in our throats,
automatically knowing
all of the notes,
and all the harmonies,

We have only to open our mouths
and there is music.

And from our perches
in the tree tops high,
from a long way off,
we can see
spring coming.

…

The second half of this pairing involved Sarah Beth giving Carole Plante a poem as a starting point. Sarah Beth provided this poem:

A Last Love Letter to Van Gogh

I want to tell you I love you,
but I should just shut my mouth.

I want to tell you that no one has ever used yellows
quite as brilliantly as you, not in a hundred years.
That I can’t even look at a night sky because the stars will pale
in comparison to the complexities of your canvas.

That I would have cut off my own roots,
and my life short
to have been the subject of your still life.

To have been as a vase upon your table,
that you would have looked upon me with such focus,
and learned my every detail so intimately
as only a painter can;

I want to tattoo your fingerprints
in a banner across my chest & ribs,
The way they have been
re-surfacing there
in the dust of my
soul for years, rising like
suns over the foreign landscape
of my forgotten flesh.

I want to cut out my heart and send it to you,
like a school girl’s paper Valentine, so anatomical
and precise– beautiful in a way
that only nature & the things unseen
inside us are beautiful; to
uncage this injured bird & let it fly to you—

In
my note
I would say
“My Darling,
Here is the heart
That has always been yours,
Send me your ear
and I will whisper to you
with my last breath,
of all the things I was afraid to say
in life.”